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'DEPRAVED' NIGHT DETAILED AT CLOSE OF LOUIMA TRIAL

On the first day of closing arguments in an explosive case of police brutality in New York City, a Federal prosecutor declared yesterday that four police officers had brutalized Abner Louima in a night of violence and terror that ended in a vicious assault by two of them in a police station restroom.

''It's hard to believe that something so depraved and so cruel could actually happen, let alone that it could be two New York police officers in uniform who did it,'' the prosecutor, Alan Vinegrad, told the jury, saying that one officer restrained Mr. Louima while another rammed a stick into Mr. Louima's rectum in a restroom at a Brooklyn police station two years ago.

Two other officers are charged with beating Mr. Louima in a police car, and a fifth, a sergeant, is accused of trying to cover up the alleged assault.

The officer who wielded the stick, Justin A. Volpe, interrupted the trial last week in Federal District Court in Brooklyn to plead guilty, and was no longer at the defense table when Mr. Vinegrad spoke yesterday. Mr. Volpe's unexpected exit from the case came after he decided that the testimony against him had become insurmountable and that his best course was to plead guilty and throw himself on the mercy of the court.

Although neither the prosecution nor the defense called Mr. Volpe to testify, feeling that he had no credibility, both sides invoked his name yesterday to their own ends. The prosecution portrayed Mr. Volpe as the ''driving force'' of the crimes against Mr. Louima, but said that the other officers were his willing accomplices in various stages of the attack. The two defense lawyers who presented their closing arguments sought yesterday to use Mr. Volpe's plea to suggest to the jury that the only guilty party had already come forward.

Officer Charles Schwarz is charged with beating Mr. Louima in a police car and restraining him during the attack in the bathroom. Two other officers, Thomas Wiese and Thomas Bruder, are charged with joining Mr. Volpe and Officer Schwarz in beating Mr. Louima in the car between his arrest in a street melee outside a Flatbush nightclub and the attack with the stick in the restroom.

Doctors said the attack tore Mr. Louima's rectum and bladder, causing injuries that required three operations. And the final defendant, Sgt. Michael Bellomo, is accused of trying to cover up the beating in the police car and an assault by Mr. Volpe on a second man, Patrick Antoine, in the area of the street brawl.

Lawyers for Officer Schwarz and Sergeant Bellomo are to give their closing arguments today. Yesterday, lawyers for Officers Wiese and Bruder told the jury in their summations that though Mr. Louima might have been tortured by Officer Volpe in the restroom, he had not been beaten in the patrol car.

Instead, they maintained, Mr. Louima had fabricated that incident both because he was enraged at every police officer who had been involved in his arrest, which had ended with the restroom attack, and because he and his family believed that he had to embellish his encounter with the police to make his account of the attack in the restroom more credible.

''It's clear that he was violently assaulted in the bathroom and Justin Volpe was part of that,'' Officer Bruder's lawyer, Stuart London, told the jurors in a courtroom whose gallery was packed for the closing arguments. ''But he has to exaggerate what happened on the street,'' Mr. London continued, because Mr. Louima and his family ''needed to create more on the street so people would believe the bathroom'' attack.

A lawyer for Officer Wiese, Joseph Tacopina, said that another reason for Mr. Louima to make up the story about being beaten in the police car was that he was so angry over the torture that ''he wanted everyone or anyone who had anything to do with his arrest that night to pay.''

Another lawyer for Officer Wiese, Russell M. Gioiella, touched on a theme that was laced through yesterday's defense arguments: that while one sympathized with Mr. Louima for having been ''violated in the bathroom,'' that ''doesn't give him the right to blame innocent people for things they didn't do.''

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Another theme in the defense arguments by the lawyers for Officers Bruder and Wiese was that their clients had been charged because of what Mr. Volpe had done in the restroom to Mr. Louima, a 32-year-old immigrant from Haiti.

''Thomas Wiese sits here because of what that monster Justin Volpe did to Abner Louima in that bathroom,'' Mr. Tacopina asserted.

But the prosecutor, Mr. Vinegrad, an assistant United States attorney in Brooklyn, apparently anticipated that argument and insisted that the remaining defendants had each committed crimes in the case.

In his summation, Mr. Vinegrad returned to the prosecution's contention that the four officers who were charged with assaulting Mr. Louima had mistakenly believed that he had punched Officer Volpe in the face and knocked him down during the melee. Mr. Vinegrad called Mr. Louima ''a man who Justin Volpe, Charles Schwarz, Thomas Bruder and Thomas Wiese decided to violently punish for a crime that, as it turns out, he did not even commit.''

And while Mr. Volpe ''was angry and wanted revenge'' and was the ''driving force behind what happened to Abner Louima in that bathroom,'' Mr. Vinegrad said, ''he had help,'' and ''it was Charles Schwarz who was all too willing to give it to him.''

In entering his guilty plea last week, after three weeks of testimony in the case, Officer Volpe said another officer was present during the attack on Mr. Louima in the restroom, but he did not identify that officer. Until the guilty plea, the prosecution had focused much of its efforts on Mr. Volpe, and wrapped up its case against the other defendants in two days. Defense lawyers also quickly rested their cases, saying they had refuted the prosecution's case in cross-examinations.

In his closing argument yesterday, Mr. Vinegrad said that Mr. Louima was ''living proof of the horror of police brutality,'' and he urged the jury -- which is expected to get the case after summations end today -- to declare through its verdict that ''the rule of law must prevail.''

''This is not the back of a patrol car,'' he said. ''This is not a station house bathroom. This is a court of law.''

Much of yesterday's arguments were taken up with the details of the case and the efforts of both sides to put their own spins on the evidence.

''The man who had a wooden stick shoved up his'' rectum ''so hard it ripped his insides apart and landed him in the hospital for two months and left him with a colostomy bag for six -- he's going to make up the fact that four cops, three of whom he can't even recognize or identify, punched him and kicked him for a couple of minutes on the way to the station house?''